Lavinia Meijer

Harpist Lavinia Meijer is the recipient of numerous awards and much international acclaim. Her varied interests include crossover music and contemporary music as well as traditional harp repertory, and she is a major interpreter of the music of Philip Glass.

Meijer was born in 1983 in South Korea but raised in the Netherlands by adoptive parents from age two. She joined the young artists' program at the Utrecht Conservatory at 11 and graduated with honors from that institution in 2003. Meijer went on to the Amsterdam Conservatory, earning a master's degree there in 2005. She has toured all over the globe with many leading orchestras, including the Residentie Orkest, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. She released several albums on the Channel Classics label, including her interpretations of works by Handel, Bach, and Scarlatti on the 2004 release 1685. In 2007, she was awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship, often a stepping stone to a top international career. In 2009, she received one of the most prestigious awards in The Netherlands: the Dutch Music Prize. She released the album Metamorphosis/The Hours in 2012, which featured works by Philip Glass. This also earned Meijer gold record status for classical music from The Dutch Association of Producers and Importers of Video & Audio Media. Meijer has experimented with the traditional concert setting, sometimes performing solo concerts in candlelit rooms.

Since signing with Sony Classical and releasing an album of music by crossover composer Ludovico Einaudi in 2014, Meijer has emerged as one of the world's best-known harpists. On her next album, Voyage, Meijer mixed classical standards with music from the soundtrack to the film Amélie by composer Yann Tiersen. Her 2015 live album In Concert showcased her interest in both contemporary composition and vernacular genres. Meijer returned to Glass in 2017 with The Glass Effect, featuring not only music by Glass but also compositions by younger composers, some of them (such as rock musician Bryce Dessner) from outside the classical sphere. Those composers included Meijer herself, who arranged music from Glass' Koyaanisqatsi for harp. Meijer released (with Maud Geffray) a third Glass album, Still Life: A Tribute to Philip Glass, in 2019. The following year, she appeared on the album Peaceful Choir: The New Sound of Choral Music. Her albums on Sony Classical in the 2020s include Winter (2024). ~ James Manheim & James Pearce, Rovi